I’ve been at the frontier my entire career. I didn’t plan it that way. I just kept showing up where things were about to change — and building before the debate was over.
Combat photojournalist. Silicon Valley product manager. On-air host. Podcast builder. AI strategist. That’s the résumé version. Here’s the real one.
Flint, Michigan. The Beginning.
My father, Thomas Van Johnson, owned a TV repair shop. His initials were on the sign. He later became Chief Engineer at WLS-TV in Chicago — the first African-American to head engineering at a major television show. He got there because Oprah Winfrey recommended him. They went to high school together in Mississippi.
He used to bring the technology home. Microwave transmission equipment. Early computers. A printer-plotter the size of a kitchen table that spent an hour drawing the Space Shuttle in precise, mechanical lines. He’d explain how all of it worked — not to impress me, just because that’s how he talked about things he loved.
What he was really teaching me: don’t fear the shift. Get in front of it. Learn how it works before everyone else decides whether it’s real.
That lesson is the through-line for everything that came after. Everything.
The Air Force. Learning to See.
I enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1987. Combat Photojournalist career field. Eight years of active duty — Japan during Desert Storm and Desert Shield, then Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, shooting rocket launches from helicopters.
Photography taught me how to see. Not just compose — see. Pressure, deadline, one frame. No second chances. That discipline never left.
At Vandenberg, I proposed, got funded, then built the first digital imaging lab from scratch – I think we had one Quadra 950 at the time. Selected the hardware. Assembled the software stack. My unit org was among the first in the entire U.S. military to deploy DSLR equipment and digital workflows. So, the Air Force gave me a Commendation Medal for it.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just run the playbook I’d use for the rest of my career: get to the technology first, figure it out, build the infrastructure, and document what you learned.
Silicon Valley. Before It Was a Cliché.
After my honorable discharge, I studied Business and Visual Communication at UC Santa Barbara. Then the San Jose Mercury News hired me as Chief Multimedia Producer — one of the first roles of its kind anywhere. We were putting video and audio on the web before anyone had a name for what we were doing.
Yahoo! came next. Senior Marketing Manager on their brand-new mobile team. The assignment, handed to me on day one: figure out Yahoo!’s entire mobile strategy. My team built and launched Yahoo!’s first mobile products — Email, Calendar, Contacts, Finance — years before the iPhone existed.
Then came Yahoo! FinanceVision: a 24-hour live streaming network built inside Yahoo!’s own broadcast studios. I was one of five on-air hosts. My beat was technology.
On September 11th, 2001, we went live immediately — no FCC delays, no satellite uplinks, no waiting. For some people that day, we were their only source for what was actually happening. Not because we were better funded than the networks. Because the internet doesn’t care about any of that.
After that morning, what we were building didn’t feel like a detour anymore.
Apple brought me in as Senior Product Manager on Digital Imaging — iPhoto, iDVD, Aperture. I worked on the tools that defined how an entire generation organized, edited, and shared photographs. I traveled to London to help launch the iTunes Music Store UK, right as those iconic iPod silhouette ads went up across the city.
Adobe was next. I joined the Lightroom team when it was still fighting for its life against Aperture. Feature strategy. Go-to-market. I was the bridge between Adobe’s engineers and the professional photography community — translating what photographers actually needed into what the product actually did.
We made Lightroom the industry standard. It still is.
I didn’t just use these tools. I helped build them. That’s a different kind of credibility.
The White House.
They asked me to stand in for the President.
The occasion: the first-ever live-streamed White House Town Hall. Three days of rehearsal. I wore a suit, blue tie, American flag pin. Sat in Obama’s chair in the Roosevelt Room while they calibrated the lighting and sound. Secret Service in every corner.
He came in late — had to get to Michelle for Valentine’s Day. I got up. He sat down. The stream went perfectly.
In the handshake line afterward, he said: “I hear you’ve been impersonating me.”
I said: “Yes sir. But only in the best way possible.”
The next year, when he reached me in the line: “Hello Frederick, nice to see you again.” He remembered my name. I don’t think he greeted anyone else that way.
TWiP. Building Something That Lasts.
In 2015 I took over This Week in Photo — a small photography podcast with a few thousand listeners and no infrastructure. I applied everything I’d learned about systems, marketing, and media operations, and built it into one of the most respected photography communities in the world. 100,000+ followers. A community photographers actually trust.
In 2022, Awesome Inc. — parent company of SmugMug and Flickr — acquired TWiP. I joined the organization and now serve as Head of Content and New Media, running TWiP as an operating unit while working across strategy, content, and community for the broader photography ecosystem.
I also serve on the board of the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, voted in unanimously as Vice Chairman, after serving for just 18 months. IPHF is about acknowledging the past, while celebrating the future. I’m one of the few people who can speak both languages fluently — honoring the legacy of the art form — while standing at the cutting edge of what’s next.
AI and the Creative Revolution.
Somewhere along the way, a new thread wove itself through almost everything I was doing: artificial intelligence. Not as a buzzword. Not as a threat. As the most significant democratizing force for creative professionals since the internet itself.
I started speaking about it on stages — first cautiously, then with conviction. AI isn’t replacing photographers and storytellers. It’s collapsing the distance between a creative idea and a finished, professional result. It’s giving individual creators worldwide, the leverage that used to require a team, a budget, and a building. The same shift my father watched happen in broadcast television, except this time the beneficiaries are the creators — not just the corporations.
That’s the message I bring to stages, podcasts, and anyone who’ll listen: AI is an amplifier, not a replacement. Learn to use it before the debate about whether it’s real is over.
What I’m Focused On Now.
My day job is building TWiP and contributing to the broader SmugMug | Flickr ecosystem — growing the community, shaping the content strategy, and making sure photographers have a place that takes them seriously.
Outside of that, I’m doing what I’ve always done: building. Writing. Speaking. Working with a small number of people and organizations who want to understand what’s actually shifting in the creative economy — and how to get ahead of it instead of getting run over by it.
The throughline hasn’t changed. It’s just running on better infrastructure now.
The Part That Matters Most.
I’m a father of four. Cameron LeShawn is on the leadership team at Ford in Chicago — he’s got four kids of his own who call me Grandpa Fred. Eric is twenty-five, building AI systems at NEC in Japan. Alexis is twenty-eight, running her own business in Japan. And Cameron Ruth is twelve, right here in Tracy, California, watching her dad build all of this in real-time.
Everything else — the Air Force, Silicon Valley, the White House, every stage and every microphone — is context. This is the point.
I kept showing up at the front and making something great out of what I found.
I’m still there.
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